voi CesThat ‘sweet friend’, mimesis, could not of course prove her title; the divine madness
of poetry’s origin means that creative practice cannot finally be admitted to the ideal
city; emotions and mimesis confound right thinking, and reason must, finally, in this
argument, take the premier place.
plato may have sparked this line of thought and laid out the grounds for the ‘ancient
quarrel’, but his was not the last word on the subject. his work has generated a mass of
volumes on the question of whether, and what, art can contribute to knowledge, and
this discussion has established the context in which artists in the academy now work,
one where creative practitioners seem obliged to take sides, and to commit to either
the madness of art or the cool clear thinking of philosophy. in some important cases,
assertions have been made that poetry has claims on both sides of the argument. in
the sixteenth century, for example, philip sidney stated that poetry was ‘the first light-
giver to ignorance, and first nurse, whose milk by little and little enabled them to feed
afterwards of tougher knowledges’ (sidney 1922 [c.1583]: 2): a view of poetry that
combines inspiration and knowledge. in the final years of the eighteenth century, the
early Romantics discussed philosophy as an incomplete form, and Friedrich schlegel
imagined a brave new world of collaboration between the arts and sciences (schlegel
1971: 34). Ralph Waldo emerson, a continent away and a century later, engaged not
so much with plato’s ‘ancient quarrel’ as with his own conception of the ‘old divorce’
between poetry and nature – which he phrased as ‘nature and the mind’ (emerson
2009 [1876]: 52) – the harmony of which would support his imperative to achieve
intuitive Reason. in the twentieth century, C.p. snow (who was himself both scientist
and novelist) in his famed 1959 Rede lecture argued passionately – and in a way
reminiscent of schlegel’s point – that the lack of communication between the two
spheres (the sciences and the humanities, which he called the ‘two cultures’ of modern
society in his subsequent publication The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution),
was significantly hindering the solving of the world’s major problems. australian poet
les murray went even further in his lecture, ‘The suspect captivity of the Fisher King’,
where he asserted that ‘any true poem is greater than the whole enlightenment, more
important and more sustaining of human life’ (murray 1997: 187).
poets, then, insist that poetry is a knowledge discourse, though they rarely explain
or provide evidence for this assertion. They do perform a useful function in pointing
out the limits on philosophy and the need to infuse cold reason with intuition and
passion. Typically, however, their view of knowledge is one that at best trembles on the
edge of transcendentalism and is more closely affiliated with Romantic naïveté than
with enlightenment logic. Wallace stevens, that superbly philosophical poet, took a
critical view of this tendency, writing that ‘after one has abandoned a belief in god,
poetry is the essence that takes its place as life’s redemption’ (1990: 185). Certainly,
the exchange of one form of magical thinking (religion) for another (art) can be seen
in much of the writing about poetry and/as knowledge.
however, in the writings that result from this practice – that is, in the creative
artefacts themselves – it is often possible to identify an approach to knowledge that
does not rely on magical thinking, ‘mere’ intuition or affect. poetry is, as the etymology
of the word ‘stanza’ implies, associated with a ‘standing place’ or ‘stopping point’,^4 and
thus affords a sort of viewing platform, a perspective from which to view what lies
ahead before plunging down into it. in poem after poem it is possible to identify this